By Jing Wang & Jiuheng He

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become central to public-facing policy programs, yet they remain undertheorized, only treated as either instruments or objects of such policies. This paper argues that ICTs in such programs operate as transductive infrastructures, a delivery chain not only transmitting policy information but also defining the intentions and consequences of the stakeholders. Through a comparative analysis of three recent financial literacy initiatives: the UK’s Money and Pensions Service, the European Commission’s 2025 Financial Literacy Strategy, and JPMorgan Chase’s Financial Health Initiative, this research demonstrates how the ICT-based system, including evaluation metrics, scoring schemas, interface designs, and user prompts, constitutes the delivery chains and interprets what financial literacy comes to mean for the public. We categorize the knowledge construction processes into linear, recursive, and fragmented regimes; each features distinct ways of reshaping the meaning of financial literacy at every node of the information delivery chain. The discrepancy issue, we argue, is intrinsic to the ICT-based infrastructure for public knowledge building, and the failures are often rooted in the users’ lack of knowledge of digital media tools or in the capacity to read a given media interface, as shaped by political and economic contexts. As ICTs are increasingly adopted to popularize political-economic agendas, the concept of transductive infrastructures has significant implications for adjacent policy domains, including health, climate, and AI literacies, where similar infrastructural dynamics are now constructing public knowledge.

Source SSRN